[Beowulf] important WDC firmware update

[Bruce Allen]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2007, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Feb 2007 at 2:17pm, Bruce Allen wrote
>
>> Here is an important firmware update for WDC WDXXXXYS series drives on RAID 
>> controllers.  Without this update you will see period drive dropouts and 
>> rebuilds on the RAID sets.  We've been seeing this a lot with some Areca 
>> controllers; I am hoping that this firmware update will fix the problem.
>
> Again!?  You'd think they would have learned from last time.
>
> http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=10240
>
> Note that more drives than just those mentioned in that link were affected, 
> and note the date -- 2003.  *sigh*  What's old is new again, apparently.
>
> Thanks for the heads up.

You're welcome!

The old problem was the infamous acoustic noise reduction setting.  Here I 
think the onlly change needed was to modify the default value of the 
firmware setting, which could also have been done with hdparm.

The new problem seems to be related to the SMART auto offline test which 
the drive periodically runs to update its SMART data.  But this is just an 
educated guess based on what WDC has written in their FAQ.

Cheers,
 	Bruce